Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, said she ran afoul of school authorities after she aired a clip in two tutorials of a debate on gender-neutral pronouns featuring polarizing University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

As I just mentioned the other day, I don’t see Peterson as a serious or interesting source, but that’s way beside the point here. Shepherd was doing a “here are examples of opposing points of view on this subject,” not a “here are two of my very favorite thinkers for you to admire.” Peterson is conspicuous for his views on gender and pronouns, so it would make sense to use him for one pole.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

Shepherd said she was chastised by her superiors for failing to condemn Peterson’s remarks outright and told her neutral approach to the clip was tantamount to remaining neutral on other objectionable views such as those of Adolf Hitler.

The university would not confirm what was said to Shepherd, but said it had enlisted an unidentified “neutral third-party professional” to “gather the facts” of the situation.

Well guess what, there’s a recording, and excerpts from it have been published. (Shepherd is very clear and her inquisitors are farther away and much less clear, so I assume it’s Shepherd who both recorded the inquisition and gave it to the press.)

I urge listening to it. It’s a little over 9 minutes, and it’s deeply disgusting.

I transcribed some. Do listen, though, to get the full sanctimony and confidence of her torturers.

Man: “It is discriminatory to be targeting someone due to their gender identity or gender expression. So, bringing something like that up in class, not critically – and I understand that you’re trying to, like –

LS: “It was critical. I introduced it critically.”

Man: “How so?”

LS: “Like I said, it was in the spirit of debate.”

Man: “Ok. In the spirit of the debate is slightly different than being like, ok, this is like a problematic idea that we might want to unpack – “

LS: “But that’s taking sides.” [1:48]

[skip ahead]

Man: “You’re perfectly entitled to your own opinion, but when you’re bringing it into the context of the classroom, that can be problematic.” [3:02]

Woman: “Let me mention the gender violence, the gender and sexual violence policy…doesn’t mean just violence but that does include targeting folks based on gender, so that includes transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, all those sorts of things are protected under the policy.”

She doesn’t mean “protected,” obviously, she means the opposite.

It’s awful. Awful. She’s there alone and they’re accusing her of all this nonsense, full of smugness and disapproval.

For Shepherd, the incident has raised fundamental questions about the purpose of a post-secondary institution.

Silencing unpopular opinions is not true to the spirit of an institution that purports to encourage intellectual exploration, she said, adding that launching a third-party investigation only reinforces that impression.

“This was an opportunity for the university to be like ‘it’s true, we should be able to have a debate, we’re sorry it became an issue and we’re happy to foster debate in the university environment,’ ” she said. “Instead, they’re being weird about it.”

Shepherd said the lesson to her communications tutorial class was focusing on the complexities of grammar.

Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can affect the society in which it is spoken in ways people might not anticipate. To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had probably been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.

The clip of Peterson debating sexual diversity scholar Nicholas Matte, she said, was meant to demonstrate ways in which the existence of gender-specific pronouns has caused controversy.

Shepherd said a student complained about the clip, which she showed to two tutorials of roughly 24 participants each. In response, she said, her supervisors censured her for airing the clips, told her she was “transphobic” for playing them and said she ought to have spoken out against the positions Peterson expressed during the excerpt.

They’ve told her she has to submit lesson plans and put up with people spying on her classes any time they feel like it. She’s strongly considering leaving.

22 Responses to “This is like a problematic idea that we might want to unpack”

Jesus. The WHOLE POINT of teaching critical thinking is getting the students to think for themselves and to question received wisdom and their own preconceived notions! If she had “spoken out against the positions Peterson expressed” it would have been counter to the *entire reason the class is taught*.

Holms, this is the reality in academia now. One student giving me a poor evaluation on the student evaluations, and that is what my yearly evaluation is focused on; the many that gave me good ratings, the ones (always more than one) that said I was awesome? Can’t get those listed on my evaluation no matter what.

Then, I found out that the men in my department are NOT having the same experience!

The reaction to her lecture is outrageous, but I don’t think I’d have cared much for the point she was making if I’d been a student. I don’t think the existence of masculine and feminine pronouns in English leads to or supports misogyny. And it doesn’t make any sense to say that he and she “are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.”

But…if you’re not on THIS left, you fail the purity test and you must be ostracized. Immediately. Preferably in a particularly humiliating way, and if it results in the loss of your livelihood, so much the better.

Meanwhile, I spent several minutes this weekend having it explained to me very carefully that the word “feminazi” is only ever applied to “extreme” feminists, which he defined as “hating men”. Then I was told that my use of the word Feminazi in a play trying to ridicule the concept of the word Feminazi was not to be tolerated, because I was trivializing the Holocaust. Seriously? I am seeking to ridicule the people who trivialize the holocaust by appending “nazi” to everyone they disagree with. But it is almost certain that, with that comment in hand, this group will NEVER EVER EVER consider producing this play unless I remove the offending word, in which case the play is no longer about what it’s about. This is THAT left.

Actually, I would expect adults – like those students – to cope with being presented with Hitler’s views on, say, Jewish people and racial hygiene, without needing the tutor to editorialise that they should find these views bad. I would expect the wrongness to be highlighted by the debate.

At 18 I certainly didn’t need to be told how to distinguish between views I found problematic and their opposition.

I guess she could just visit Pharyngula. He has a graphic up of how to talk to and about LGBTQ (pretty much just the T, though). He says it’s simple. Sure, it’s simple…if you squinch your eyes very tight and pretend.

Besides, that list will be out of date tomorrow, when the Transactivists change the appropriate words but forget to send out the memo, so they can spot the “TERFs” by their inappropriate use of verboten words.

Now you’re just being silly. Why attack a male with some level of visibility and power, when you can attack a young female graduate student and potentially ruin her life? You don’t get it, do you? So much fun to ruin women, especially young women, not so much fun to challenge men, who might be able to challenge you right back…and also has a nice big platform to air your nastiness for the whole world to see.

The little teenage turd in Kent who hassled a woman out of her Labour party position and then got elected Women’s Officer in another constituency for instance. Little turd has been a “trans woman” for all of 5 months. Little turd had a Twitter account that linked to a rape site in the profile.